Photos from Gencon 2008

I forgot my actual camera, but it turns out that my new Sony Ericsson camera phone takes halfway decent photos. Here are a handful of scenes from Gencon 2008.














This was nifty -- Mayfair and Days of Wonder (and a few other companies I may have missed?) had set up a board game room where you could "check out" a game and play it on a nearby table, then return it and try a new one.














Here's the game room itself. Through the doors on the far wall was a much larger room, about the size of a gymnasium, with lots of game space.














Every table in this room was a different D&D game.














Scanthan and Ben on Saturday night playing Cuylas. A few minutes later we wrapped up our game and these two gents embarked on a night of hijinx in Indianapolis. They dropped in on the steampunk-themed Gencon dance and tried (unsuccessfully) to crash the uber-pretentious White Wolf party.














Tower of Gygax! The DM handed out two copies of each character, then proceeded to run a rotating cast of characters through a super old-school dungeon named for the iconic father of D&D. We used the first edition rules, and it was a blast. My gnome illusionist died after he looted the wrong body and a cascade of molten gold washed over him.

Steampunk: The humor hammer falls

Here's the bookend to last week's gushy post about the cool new steampunk newsletter:. In a blisteringly funny essay, McSweeney's has taken the genre apart and reduced it to its most embarassing elements:

This looks like a late-18th-century organette, correct? Look again. It hides the Dell laptop you got me when I went to college. This bronze hand crank turns it on, and I've hidden a miniature photo printer where the tune sheet is supposed to go. I even installed Linux. I've put a lot of time into this since I quit my job at Anthropologie, which is something else I wanted to tell you about. Don't get up and go to Lowe's yet. But when you're there can you get me a two-speed fan capacitor?

How diverse is your gaming group?

Mr. noisms over at Monsters & Manuals wrote up an interesting response to an ongoing discussion about race in D&D, and how the industry as a whole tends to default to the well-muscled white male human fighter -- despite the fact that we're playing a game that lets us pretend to be all kinds of much-more-interesting stuff: elves, Norse gods, well-intentioned aliens...heck, even grammar-school kids!

It got me thinking about the various gaming groups I've been a part of since 2000, when I started college and my gaming career began in earnest. I first fell in with a group of very creative and successful game publishers, who had recently collaborated on several acclaimed gaming projects. They were all about 7 or 8 years older than me, and they really helped give me a boost into the hobby. Looking back, they were -- quite literally -- the "Old Boys Club" of that small college town. That's the phrase my friend (himself a member of the club) used when reflecting on these inspiring fellows.

Fast-forward to Chicago. As I mentioned over at Monsters & Manuals, my most recent Mutants & Masterminds group was composed of one white dude, one white Jewish dude, one white chick, two Puerto Rican dudes and one black dude. Pretty much nothing was off-limits, and the mirth around the gaming table could get pretty raunchy at times. It was a slice of pure Americana, I think.

How about you guys? Can you top my group in terms of sheer diversity? Surely there's someone out there who's had Russians, Inuits and Sumo wrestlers rolling dice around the same table...

The full report from Gamer's Asylum in Evanston, IL

EDIT: I admit when I am wrong with a prediction, and this was certainly one of those times. Gamer's Asylum is still open in Evanston, and the store has expanded into some adjacent retail space. So things are looking up as of 7/29/2009, and I am adding this note to my original article to balance out some of the things I mention below that haven't come to pass.

Well, I dropped by Gamer’s Asylum last night. Here’s my capsule review: Keep your calendar open for a going-out-of-business sale in 8 months or so.

The store has a great location in downtown Evanston near the Dempster train station, and it’s run by a couple of friendly, talkative dudes. But I couldn’t discern much by way of a business plan; the shop was almost completely devoid of merchandise (save for a pile of “starter” Games Workshop product). The shelves were half-full and the walls were bare - not even posters! As someone who’s worked in gaming retail, this is a bad way to start a store.

The owners, to their credit, explained that they intend to respond to the community’s demands and stock various game lines, depending on their popularity. Unfortunately, this is a classic example of putting the cart before the horse. Game stores need to be stuffed to the gills with merchandise to survive and prosper. You need to surround your potential customers with a dizzying array of products – game books, miniatures, collectible junk, dice, paints, accessories, junk food – all in the hope that they’ll make just a single purchase in a given visit. Vast, herculean efforts are required to draw in new customers and keep them coming back, especially in light of the omnipresent Internet retailers.

You also can’t rely on existing player demand to fuel a store. You must constantly bring in new products and establish relationships with the myriad game publishers out there. You must read the industry blogs and literature and make sure you’re up on the latest new releases. If you do stock a given line, you must conduct demos and promotional events to draw in new players and customers.

Gamer’s Asylum doesn’t even have a Web site! How can that be in this day and age? The two store owners, for all their goodwill and enthusiasm, seem to have started the store simply as a way to hang out and talk to gamers. This is heartbreaking, because Chicago needs an in-city alternative to Games Plus (a fine store that’s just a bit too far away for convenience). Make no mistake, I will support Gamer’s Asylum and buy some stuff from them. I’ll game there and hopefully meet new players there. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to count on it for the long haul. By stumbling immediately out of the gate, Gamer’s Asylum may have lost its momentum entirely. I’ll report back when they start their 50-percent-off liquidation sale.

Dungeons and Dragons, Year Zero

Via Jeff’s Gameblog comes a post from SquareMans that hit me with an almost tangible wave of nostalgia. I’m not old enough to have enjoyed D&D back in its original, stapled-pamphlet iteration, but this account of a group of veteran gamers sitting down to engage in a little “roots gaming” really gave me pause, especially when considered in the context of Gary Gygax’s recent passing.

Amid the nostalgia and grandeur of old-school D&D is a bit of keen commentary from SquareMans about what can only be described as “rules creep” - the tendency to add layers and layers of nuanced rules to each subsequent RPG release. D&D 4E is almost upon us, and it’s worth remembering that there was a time when D&D was rules-lite and nearly every adventure ended in TPD - total party death.

The rules themselves were barely there. You had to make it all up. This put so much responsibility on the GM. He had to be entertaining, imaginative, fair, rational. In many ways the steady march away from original D&D has been a sustained effort to remove the effects of a bad GM on the game. The more game elements are objectively determined, written down in books, the less you have to rely on the GM. The less you need a really good GM to run the game. And yes, the more of a science it becomes, and less of an art. Running this game was an art form and only a few people could do it really well. There’s something magical about that. Newer versions become more systematized and therefore more people can play. Mediocre GMs can run good games. But, if I’m being honest with myself, something of the magic is lost. That feeling that most of this game lived in your mind. Because of that, I think, it was more real. As more and more of the game lived in the rules and on character sheets, it became a game instead of a world in your head.

About the author

The title of this blog comes from my very first web-based email address. The address has been defunct for a long time now (replaced by the much more mundane my.name [at] gmail [dot] com formula; better for professional networking) but it illustrates my own outlook on gaming that I hope to present on this little blog.



I heart roleplaying in (almost) all its incarnations (I've never LARPed, so I have no perspective on that genre). I started with West End Game's Star Wars RPG in 1995 and have moved through a variety of systems and settings over the years. To me, RPGs are best enjoyed around a table with beers and chips and buddies. It's a pasttime, plain and simple, and it ain't worth agonizing over.

That said, if you're going to do something, you ought to do it right. I'm a professional writer and editor, and I take very seriously the art of crafting and developing a story. That responsibility becomes even more sublime when it comes to shared narratives, where five or six people collaborate on a single broad plotline. Everyone has a vested interest in keeping the story going from a meta-game standpoint. I hope to expound here on a few topics that I've noticed over my relatively few years of gaming.